So Far Nothing Unique About Pilbara and Novo

This morning Novo has issued a news release to update the exploration at the Purdy's Reward joint venture with Artemis. As revealed and discussed in the geological compendium blog entry I posted several days ago (and which I kept updating with historical commentary), the conglomerate-hosted gold in the Pilbara probably doesn't have a separate fine fraction that would make it easy to explore or provide a good grade estimation for development and mining purposes. A fine fraction would be more disseminated than the nuggety high grade gold they have found so far by metal detector and trenching. Fine gold would therefore be an attractive feature to what is otherwise an extremely skewed hit-and-miss type gold deposit (typical of placers worldwide). Alas, electron microscope work has revealed fine gold to be:

halos of particles within a few millimeters of much coarser gold nuggets. Novo believes such fine-grained gold was remobilized and re-precipitated following burial and lithification of gold-bearing gravels.

This is bad.

Then, Novo goes on to say another bad thing. Apparently the wide diameter reverse circulation drilling is simply not going to work for collecting a large sample size from buried conglomerate beds. The ability to collect large underground samples, given the nuggety nature of the gold, is critical to exploration and building a gold resource. Without drilling, they will have to actually excavate or dig down to the beds and take bulk samples directly. Not only would this be very expensive but it couldn't be done over a large area without literally years if not decades of effort. So for now they are left with trenching where the conglomerates outcrop and this creates a very serious limit on the tonnage of resource they are able to develop in the short to medium term.

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice, just an opinion. Consult your own expert. No direct or indirect position in, or any relationship with, Novo Resources.

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